Part 13 Unperson #2
Okay, then.
Buried alive. In concrete.
Not how I thought I’d die, if I was being totally honest.
(My money had been on an angry cheating husband shooting me when I discovered him with a hooker at a cheap motel.)
Being buried alive is such a common fear among people that it has a name: taphophobia.
I’d even read a book about it once.
Being buried alive had actually been a genuine issue in centuries past, so much so that people were sometimes buried with bells on their coffins with a string going inside; the buried person could ring the bell if they weren’t actually dead and woke up inside their coffin. It happened. More than once.
The fear is that you’ll spend a very long time trapped in a dark claustrophobic space, terrified and afraid, until eventually you starve.
But it’s not that bad.
You won’t starve.
You won’t even die of thirst.
You’ll run out of oxygen before either of those things happen.
You’ll suffocate.
At length the sound of pouring concrete stopped.
Silence.
Had they stayed? Had the Unperson left one of his hench--people to watch the concrete-filled pit to make sure I didn’t emerge?
I didn’t know.
I couldn’t know.
I regathered my wits and there in my pitch-black tomb, the first thing I did was some math.
I needed to calculate how much air was in my box and thus how long I had to live.
My concrete ‘coffin’ was about seven feet long, four or five feet wide and maybe three feet high.
That was approximately 1,520 litres of space.
Now, I myself was taking up some of that space, as were the bodies of Roman and Dmitri Oberov, say 200 litres.
So I had, best guess, 1,320 litres of breathable air.
Recalling the book I’d read, the average person breathes roughly half a litre of oxygen per minute, so that gave me about twenty-two hours before I suffocated.
Twenty-two hours to live.
If I could slow my breathing rate a little, I could eke out maybe an hour more.
Then I tried to think about how I could get out.
The most efficient way, of course, would be to call someone, but I didn’t have a phone.
The absolute dark pressed in around me.
It was disconcerting.
And the concrete tub’s floor was rough and uncomfortable, covered in little raised spikes of raw concrete.
My hands were still flex-cuffed in front of my body. Before I did anything else, I had to take care of them.
I pressed the ‘light’ button on my Casio watch and my little contained environment was suddenly, if dimly, illuminated.
(I was amazed at how much comfort even this small amount of light gave me. Sight is a very powerful sense.)
Using the dim light of my digital watch, I found a particularly sharp concrete spike in the floor.
Then I rubbed the plastic cuffs back and forth against it until, snap, they broke and my hands sprang apart, free.
Excellent.
Then I had another thought.
About light.
I patted the bodies of Oberov and his son.
Of course, their phones had been taken, too, but a phone wasn’t what I was looking for.
I was after Roman Oberov’s gold jet-flame lighter.
I found it in his jacket pocket.
I flicked it on . . .
. . . and my little prison was instantly much better illuminated.
I was able to scan the whole box and the gruesome bodies of the two Russians in it with me.
But my predicament was unchanged.
And as I continued to think about it, and as the pool of concrete above me settled, the sad truth of my situation became clear.
I was screwed.
Completely and utterly screwed.
I was going to die here, buried alive in concrete next door to an amusement park at Coney Island.
I flicked off the lighter to preserve its precious light.
I lay in the darkness, trying to breathe slowly, to conserve my air.
I wondered if I shouted, would anyone hear me. I doubted it.
An hour passed.
Then two.
I nodded off.
When I woke and pressed the light button on my watch, it was 4:02 a.m.
Four hours had passed since I’d been entombed.
As I looked at my watch, I realised that it was now officially December 31st, New Year’s Eve.
It was then that a new emotion began to consume me.
Hopelessness.
I’m not prone to being emotional, but even I have a limit.
And this feeling—the complete and total loss of hope—I realised, was the Unperson’s purpose in killing me this way.
I had nothing but time.
To think and wait for death.
Alone.
Helpless.
Thoughts of taking my last breath ran across my mind. Would it be a sudden final choking inhalation? Would I gasp at the lack of oxygen?
Thoughts of Audrey. Of her smile, her perfume, of our time together.
Damn.
I picked up the hypodermic syringe that the Unperson had tossed into my box, the one filled with Duramorph.
I could just inject myself with its contents and go to sleep . . .
. . . and run out of air while I was dreaming.
A small mercy, he’d called it.
A painless way to die.
It didn’t seem like such a bad option now.
No.
Fuck that.
I wasn’t going down without a fight.
And then it hit me.
A thought.
An idea.
A way out.
Concrete.
That was the thought.
Being buried alive in dirt is practically impossible to escape from, because even if you somehow managed to crack open your coffin, you can’t dig your way out through the dirt.
It’s too loose. It would cascade into your coffin like a miniature avalanche.
Dirt is also heavy and crawling through it would crush your chest and lungs. You’d suffocate trying to claw your way through it to the surface.
But I’d been buried in concrete.
And concrete isn’t like dirt.
It sets or, to use the technical term, it cures.
(Remember, before I was a detective, I was a chemical engineer.)
Basically, concrete transforms from a liquid into a solid.
This ‘curing’ of concrete is a chemical reaction where particles of calcium and silicon bind to water molecules, creating crystalline structures called calcium silicate hydrates.
As time elapses, these crystalline structures grow and fill the spaces in the concrete, making it harder as more time passes.
(This process actually never stops, although it diminishes over time. It’s been said that the concrete in the Hoover Dam, which was poured in the 1930s, is still curing to this day.)
The initial hardening happens quite quickly.
Modern industrial concrete begins to harden about six hours after pouring.
Till then it’s still semi-liquid: this is why a person can make footprints or write love notes in a newly poured sidewalk.
After about six hours, it begins to crust and solidify.
This is the moment the liquid is actually becoming a solid—a moment of ‘alchemy’ one might say—and the weakest point in the whole transformation.
(After about twenty-four hours, you can walk on it. After two days, you could drive a truck on it. In the end, it takes about four weeks for concrete to cure to acceptable strength.)
My mind zeroed in on that six-hour mark.
That was my chance.
During the very first stages of the concrete’s transformation, when it crusted from liquid to solid, it would be at its weakest, its most porous, filled with air bubbles.
That would be when I might be able to chip away at it and create a tunnel through which I could escape.
But it would be a short window of opportunity.
I couldn’t do it too early—you can’t tunnel through sludge.
I couldn’t wait too long, either—if the concrete slab around my box got too hard, I wouldn’t be able to chip away at it.
I’d also be racing against another ticking clock: steadily running out of oxygen.
I had to time it just right, but hell, the mere possibility of escape energised me.
If I was gonna die, I was gonna die trying to get out of this.
I got to work.
OVERHEAD VIEW
SIDE VIEW
I was now on the clock.
Four hours had passed.
I wanted to start my tunnelling through the newly poured slab at around the six-hour mark.
But first I had to break through one of the side concrete walls of my box.
I looked at the long right-side wall: I recalled that it was the side closest to the dirt trench on the outside of the construction site.
I would try to break through it and then dig an escape tunnel to the trench’s wall.
But my box’s concrete walls were already cured. They were as hard as rock. It would take me half a day just to chip through one of them.
I’d have to speed up that process.
I also needed a chisel of some kind.
In the dim glow of Roman Oberov’s lighter, I ferreted around my little space.
I searched the Oberovs’ pockets, looking for anything sharp, like a knife or something, but they’d been disarmed by the Unperson and his people.
Then I saw the old rusted concrete mixer in the corner of my concrete box.
At first, I saw its rusted leg-struts reaching down to some castor wheels.
They would work as chisels.
Then I saw something else.
An old lead-acid battery attached to the mixer, mounted between its little wheels.
It was like a car battery, only smaller.